oCtoBeR 2010 - American Association for Clinical Chemistry

Four Generations Rub Shoulders in Labs
lab leadership, continued from page 1
medical-industrial complex. And whether
we like it or not, we are going to be practicing
in a more complex, interdependent environment
and it’s going to put pressure on
lab directors and other supervisors to boost
their leadership abilities,” he predicted. “A
system is only as strong as its weakest link,
so if someone in the lab is stressed and not
attentive, or for whatever reason not a part of
the team, that creates a very dangerous situation
and could compromise patient safety.”
Hernandez is assistant professor of laboratory
medicine and pathology at Mayo Clinic
College of Medicine, and medical director of
laboratories and chair of laboratory medicine
at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona.
6 CliniCal laboratory news oCtoBeR 2010
New Generations, New Challenges
In addition to the forces outside the walls
of the lab pushing change, Wiley emphasized
that understanding each of the four
generations present in today’s lab is essential
to building strong teams and healthy
communication. Each of the generations
has its own distinct worldview that helps
determine their business focus, motivation,
loyalties, and values (See Figure, right). She
defined the generations as traditionalists
(1922–1945), baby boomers (1946–1964),
Xers (1965–1977), and millennials (1978–
2003). “We need to understand what motivates
each generation of workers in the
lab and how to retain great employees from
all generations,” she said. Wiley is director
of chemistry and immunology at Sacred
Heart Medical Center and PAML reference
laboratory in Spokane, Wash.
Although understanding each of these
generations in a lab is far from hard science,
Wiley underscored the fact that leaders with
poor people skills will find that their technical
knowledge is not enough to get them
through in today’s clinical labs. “I would
argue that we all have to know the hard science,
but a lab is not a robot,” she said. “A lab
is made up of a system of individuals, and
we need to be able to make our employees
feel valued and enjoy the work that they’re
doing. They can’t do that, in my opinion,
without leaders that understand them.”
Currently, most managers are baby
boomers, which in many cases can put
them out of sync with the values of Xers
and millenials who are working for them.
This can lead to managers perceiving their
younger employees as having a poor work
ethic, less commitment to their jobs, or less
respect for their employer than they actually
do, Wiley explained. One such conflict
is work hours. Boomers tend to emphasize
longer hours, while Xers emphasize
productivity. “A lot of boomers have really
dedicated themselves to their jobs and really
take pride in putting in very long hours.
But today, they’re working with other generations
who are more interested in being
very efficient and highly productive while
they’re at work, but don’t see the value in
being the first person at work and the last
person to go home,” she said. This effect
goes both ways, however, and younger
workers need to understand where their
managers are coming from in the same
way, Wiley added.
The generational difference extends beyond
the basics like work hours, though.
For example, millenials tend to be technologically
savvy, highly creative, and enjoy
working in teams. They also are more likely
to be relatively impatient and expect instant
rewards and respect. This means that millenials
won’t expect to pay their dues in the
way that other generations did, and they
expect constant feedback and the ability to
express their opinions, Wiley said. These
characteristics can add up to a profile that
seems overly demanding to generations
with different values.
“Millenials might seem high-maintenance
when you’re not used to working
in that way,” Wiley said. “I don’t necessarily
believe that we have to accommodate
all their requests at all levels, but trying to
meet some of their needs will go a long way.
On the flip side, an Xer might find it annoy-
figure 1
generational differences
in the Workplace
Traditionalist Baby Boomer Xer Millennial
Birth Years 1922–1945 1946–1964 1965–1977 1978–2003
Business Focus Quality Long hours Productivity Contribution
Motivator Security Money Time off Time off
Company
Loyalty
Highest High Low Low
Money is Livelihood Status Symbol Means to an End Today’s Payoff
Value Family & Success Time Individuality
Community
Source: Carmen Wiley, PhD
ing when dealing with a boomer that the
emphasis is all about title and recognition
and making sure they get kudos for what
they’ve done—so from another perspective
they’re high-maintenance too.”
Keeping excellent employees of each
generation satisfied with benefits and compensation
also has its challenges, as not
everyone is equally motivated by money,
time off, or the ability to be an individual
at work. “We know that when we’re dealing
with our millennial population, they are
very interested in their quality of life and
making sure that they have enough time for
their families and other civic opportunities
in the community, whereas with our baby
boomers, they are very focused on monetary
rewards for a job well done,” Wiley
said. “So maybe our millenials would prefer
to accrue vacation at a greater rate, which
would be more satisfying to them than a
raise, whereas you have an older generation
that might put more value on the raise.”
Rewarding employees with a wide variety
of incentives is not easy, however, even if
an institution’s human resources department
is very flexible, though some labs have
managed to pull it off (Read more in CLN
Online, www.aacc.org/publications/cln).
Even though most lab directors and
managers will not have the flexibility to
offer all the benefits that please everybody,
lab leaders do possess the ability to employ
“softer” types of benefits and leadership
strategies that keep these generational differences
in mind, Wiley said.
“It is well within your power, if you
know that you are working with a group of
millenials, to make sure that they are getting
feedback on their performance or assign
a project to a group of people instead
of an individual. These are things that don’t
require monetary resources that you can
implement by improving communication
with your staff,” she said. “Perhaps, if your
institution permits it, you can allow people
to wear their iPods while they’re working
on the bench because it gives them a little
personal freedom, or maybe you can make
your boomers a little more comfortable
working with millenials by setting some
basic guidelines on dress codes and enforcing
them consistently.”
Culture and Conflict
If nothing else, the constant change in labs
and the new demographic realities mean
that tackling conflict will be a top priority
for any lab leader. Managers must know
how to think strategically to avoid conflict
or to seek it, depending on the circumstances,
stressed Karon, who is associate
professor of laboratory medicine and pathology
and director of the hospital clinical
laboratories and point-of-care testing at
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “Effective
leaders not only have to be able to resolve
conflict, but at other times effective leaders
have to be able to create conflict,” he said.
Karon noted that dealing with conflict
successfully begins with understanding the
nature of the conflict, a process laid out by
Warren H. Schmidt and Robert Tannenbaum
in two seminal articles in the Harvard
Business Review—“How to Choose a
Leadership Pattern” (1958) and “Management
of Differences” (1960), which both set
records for reprint requests in publications
worldwide. “A good leader can define and
sharpen where the conflict lies, and separate
out the personal feelings and politics
from the nature of the conflict,” Karon said.
“The bottom line is that conflicts can be
prolonged if the leader doesn’t identify the
nature of the disagreement.”
Schmidt and Tannenbaum point to
conflicts of four basic natures: fact, goals,
methods, and values. Knowing which is the
source of conflict helps parties operate under
the same assumptions and keeps egos
from getting in the way, Karon said. After
ascertaining the nature of the conflict, a
leader must decide whether he or she wants
to try and minimize the conflict or promote
it, depending on the circumstances.
If the harmony of a team is judged to
be more important than the outcome of
their decisions, a leader may chose to avoid
conflict by putting together a team of like
minded individuals, Karon said. The downside
to this approach is that, in the long run,
it can stifle creativity. In a different situation,
a leader may actually want to promote
conflict when the issues at hand need to be
clarified, when members of a team need to
learn from each other in order to make better
decisions, or when there is enough time
for a group to creatively come up with new
solutions to a problem.
When choosing to highlight differences
or seek conflict, however, leaders do risk
creating worse interpersonal conflicts and
draining energy from a group if the conflict
does not become resolved successfully,
Karon said. “I think the most important
variable to consider is the importance of
the question or conflict to long-term goals
and values of the organization. Creating
conflict takes time and energy, and should
be limited to conflicts or questions that are
fundamental to long-term goals or values.”
To help leaders navigate among these
strategies to suppressing or creating conflict,
Karon further elaborated five ba-